Ok. I confess. There's nothing more that I prefer to do in my spare time than roam through flea markets, antiques centres and thrift stores.
Of course, my second favourite activity is documenting it all in these pages.
So welcome to a retreat from the world filled with vintage finds, plants and pets.

But to get there, it's been a long, bleak season... Fast backwards to December when everything just looked miserable.

And then in late winter, I put some of my plans into action and ruined (what was left of) the lawn in the process…

Oops. So here's the plan.Basically, I’m going to split up this garden into two parts with a very different look and feel. The front part (close to the house and terrace) will be a kitchen and ornamental garden, with espaliered fruit bushes and trees on the left, south-facing wall (as seen here), a big vegetable patch in the middle (so it would have been bye-bye lawn anyway)and a big herbaceous border to the right.The second and rear part of the garden - starting at the arching hazelnut - will have a wilder, woodland garden feel. I haven’t given this part too much thought yet, as my priority for this year is to sort out the front half. Flowers and food - that’s right up my sleeve. Right!So this first phase was all about putting the structure and basics of the garden into place.

The amazing gardening guys from La Ferme Nos Pilifs came by in February and started turning some of my plans into reality. I’m very grateful for the fantastic job and all the hard work they did. So if you’re in Brussels and need some help with your garden, go hire these guys !

They built this amazing composting corner from scratch, which is prolonged by a soft fruit hedge (on the left here - with wires for raspberries and blackberries to climb along).

The whole thing is also creating a physical separation between the two parts of the garden, but with enough space to the right to easily access the back (I am thinking of adding a garden gate here - for no particular reason other than I think that garden gates are über cute. We’ll see.). Once the fruit and the pierisin front of the compost (plus all the other plants I’m planning to add) will grow, they will also create a visual separation from the back garden and avoid the tunnel effect that you often have in these long, narrow town gardens. Blocking the straight view to the end of the garden will give you the illusion that the space is much bigger than it already is. Or so I’ve read in some fancy gardening books.